Category: Online Stock Trading Software

Click HERE to watch a 15-minute video on how the Historical Tools on PowerOptions can solve your back-testing needs! This discussion came from a Coaching Session with Bob, a PowerOptions Customer. Bob wanted to see how he could ‘…determine the best historical Delta selection for calls when buying SPY LEAPS.’ Well, the Historical Tools will help us with that. What Are The Historical Tools?: There are 3 main Historical Tools on PowerOptions: Historical Chain. Look up the Option Chain on any stock, on any date back to April 2006. You can then move forward or backwards, to see the price and criteria change day by day. Or, move from one month to the next and beyond to see the change in price. Historical Search By Symbol: Select a Strategy (in this case, Long Calls). Select a Screen date back in time and then select the Expiration Time Frame. The Historical…

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Earlier today I received a call from a PowerOptions subscriber. He is the owner of a far out in time put option on MOMO and the stock was up about $0.35 in the morning (Stock MOMO, at $25.76 from $25.41 at close on FEB 14th). The put option he purchased was the 2017-JULY 30 strike. At close on FEB 14th the bid-ask spread was listed at $6.60 to $7.20 – figure a mid-point price of about $6.90. Note: A wide bid-ask spread is not uncommon for options that are far out in time and not actively traded. When he looked at his brokerage account this morning, it showed a value of $5.90, down -$1.00. But the stock had only moved up +$0.35. The delta of the put option was about -0.60, and increase of $0.35 in the underlying should have dropped the put price by only -$0.24. So, what gives?…

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Introduction Just about 20 years ago I created the patented PowerOptions tools to trade my personal account after I retired from HP. At the time I wanted a better way to search across the universe of options based on my stock AND option criteria in a given strategy… I wanted a one-stop tool to simultaneously search though stock technicals, stock fundamentals, market sentiment and option data… something that was not available in 1997. The PowerOptions tools became a huge time saver – rather than pouring through articles and stock reports to find stocks that matched my sentiment, then pouring over options chains to find a combination that matched my goals, all of this was now accomplished with a few clicks. Over that tenure, the stock and options markets have seen many changes: New trade ideas are touted with the promise of unrealistic returns New securities pop up, ETFs, ETNs, Binaries…

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When I create a Search for Weekly options I start by: Click ‘Clear These Settings’. This will empty all the filter settings. Select ‘All Weeklies’ as your Options Expiration Time Frame. In the ‘Days to Expiration’ filter field enter a range of ‘2’ to ‘9’. This will filter out the options that have 1 day left to expiration but include the ones that expire 8 days away and will work for any day that you run your search. Enter in basic criteria for premium and return. Examples (not suggestions 🙂 ): Option Bid 0.15 to ____ (or your preference) % Naked Yield 0.5 to ___ % Out of Money 0.5 to ___ (or 1 to blank) Earnings Date – Not Between Now and Expiration Remember to keep your search criteria simple and basic at first when looking for weekly options. Once you submit that search you should see your desired…

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PowerOptions has added many great tools for options traders over the years. Not all of them perfectly fit into the “strategy” navigation theme that we use. As a result, some of the best tools we offer have been obscured from obvious use. Our latest update to the site has been to gather up all of these tools and put them in one place for easy access. – The SIGNATURE TOOLS tab… What might you find there?

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Of course you can! With the PowerOptions portfolio tools you can track any number of positions for any number of accounts. They can be real accounts or paper-trading accounts. We know that getting your PowerOptions portfolio “caught up” can be a hindrance to starting one at all – but, we strongly suggest that you just jump in and start tracking new trades as you put them on. Don’t worry so much about catching up the portfolio with all of your old trades. The benefit of using the PowerOptions portfolio tools to track your real and paper trades?

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In Part II of this webinar series Michael Chupka, PowerOptions Director of Education, reviews some of the basics from Part I – using the PowerOptions Search Tool and then answers attendees specific questions on using the Search Tool. (click below to view video)

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We’ve received a lot of questions, interest and comments regarding the article on short squeezes, “Short Squeeze and Stock Options”, so we’re going to follow that up with another article on short squeezes. If you had followed the covered call investing position for Bank of the Ozarks (OZRK) selected in the previous short squeeze article, you would be sitting pretty right now, as the price of the stock has increased and the time value of the November 22.5 call option is approaching zero, so an investor could have already made about 3% on the covered call position for OZRK.

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Sometimes when making lemonade there’s just not anymore juice that can be squeezed out of a lemon. In investing, there’s a similar idea with shorting a stock, sometimes the investors shorting the stocks have piled on so much, there’s no way for the stock to go down anymore. In general, short sellers of a stock have to close or buy back the stock they shorted at some point. There are the cases where the company goes bankrupt and the stock ceases to trade anymore, but in most cases short sellers have to exit.